Human Finitude Research Articles

Secularizing Kenosis

Secularizing Kenosis: Review of Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition, by Paolo Diego BubbioPaolo Diego Bubbio, Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014)The idea at the heart of Paolo Diego Bubbio's new book is a provocative and unusual one. It is that the Kantian transcendental turn, which foreclosed the possibility of achieving an understanding of things as they are 'in themselves,' had an intrinsically ethical or religious dimension, one best captured or symbolized by the Christian notion of kenotic sacrifice. Just as Christ was willing to renounce divinity in order make room in himself for human finitude, Bubbio reads the transcendental turn as enjoining us to give up our attempt to understand things as they are in themselves (thus rejecting the God's eye view of traditional metaphysics) in order to make room for the perspectives of others. Bubbio claims not only that this is a fruitful way to think about the Kantian revolution, but also that the notion of kenotic sacrifice played an important and explicit role in the writings of several major figures in the post-Kantian tradition: particularly, Solger, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. These thinkers, he claims, employed the concept of sacrifice as a way of coming to grips with the basic structure and significance of Kant's revolution. Bubbio shows that their reflections thus constitute a remarkable and unappreciated tradition of meditation on the nature of sacrifice-one that can allow us to see the deficiencies of more recent redeployments of the concept that we find in thinkers like Bataille, Derrida and Girard.As all of this suggests, Bubbio takes Kant's decision to reject traditional metaphysics, with its attempt to understand objects as they are in themselves, in favor of a revisionary conception of metaphysics in which reason is concerned only with itself or with its own products, as the most important event in modern philosophy. Although Bubbio clearly thinks Kant's revolution was quite justified, he thinks it left Kant and his successors with some unfinished business. The biggest remaining issue was to understand the source of the authority of the norms that reason supposedly imposes on itself. Bubbio shows that their reflections on this problem were often clothed in religious language, though the God that was invoked in these contexts was more a symbol for the kind of knowledge we should aspire to than a theological reality. We see the first instance of this kind of use of the notion of God in Kant's suggestion that we should understand the authority of practical norms by treating them as if they were issued by God himself. The Post-Kantians, who came to think that the authority was rooted in the self or in society, developed a modified conception of God. They conceive God as necessarily renouncing his transcendence or otherness or in order to become immanent in human consciousness or in social reality. Although Bubbio does not put it in just this way, Nietzsche's parable of the madman marks the clear endpoint of these quasi-theological reflections. With his announcement of the death of God, Nietzsche enjoins us to stop looking for some suitably post-Kantian equivalent of the God's eye view, encouraging us instead to fully embrace a conception of knowledge that is thoroughly and utterly perspectival. Despite the deep differences between these thinkers, Bubbio shows that in each case we can detect the basic structure of kenotic sacrifice: we are asked to give something up (an overly transcendent conception of knowledge or value) in order to make room for something else (a finite, properly human one).In Kant, however, these sacrificial themes are mostly implicit. Bubbio notes that the notion of sacrifice does not play any explicit role in Kant's theoretical philosophy, and plays only a minor role in Kant's practical philosophy, as when Kant speaks of sacrificing desire for duty. …

Otherwise than Identity, or Beyond Difference

This paper locates in the philosophy of Maximus the Confessor a remarkable concern for the temporality, finitude, and historicity of the human soul, that at once anticipates Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology,” but which is also capable of overcoming the limitations of philosophical nihilism. In taking up Heidegger’s claim that the recovery of ontology (and philosophy itself) depends upon the understanding of Being always in relation to its self-revelation in the finite and historical reality of human existence, it becomes clear that contemporary philosophical expression requires a “turning away” from the conceptual unity of finite beings and eternal Being, and a movement toward a radically subjective negativity. In contrast to his Neoplatonic forebears, Maximus presents a mode of thinking which is capable of surpassing Heideggerian negation, not through a denial of human particularity or finitude, but rather through a transformation of the very categories of Being and non-being themselves through his understanding of divine personhood. For Maximus such personhood is conceived of as transcending both Being and time, and yet without any loss of transcendence comes also to partake fully of both through the mystery of the Incarnation. According to Maximus, this radical event of be-coming forever transfigures the sphere of beings, bringing the historical into the transcendent, non-Being into Being, and death into life.

Wittgenstein and Heidegger

Wittgenstein and Heidegger

Political displacement at the point of reception

This essay considers the implications for political theory when the historical mediations highlighted by classical reception studies move to the centre of the analysis. Through critical engagements with work by two political theorists — Bonnie Honig’s Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge, 2013) and Jeanne Morefield’s Empires without Imperialism (Oxford, 2014) — I probe a politics of reception in which contestation over the meanings of Ancient Greece becomes a site for contemporary political (self-) understanding. Empires without Imperialism explores how early twentieth- and twenty-first-century liberal imperialists deployed ‘strategies of antiquity’ that displaced illiberal political practices onto Athens, and rhetorically enacted a tortured (and torturing) liberal state as tragic hero on the world stage. Antigone, Interrupted intervenes in current debates concerning sovereignty, in addition to questioning current preoccupations with human finitude, vulnerability, and suffering, by critically engaging Sophocles’ Antigone and its modern reception. In each case, the author’s attention to a dialogue between past and present proves politically and theoretically productive, not by exposing implausible readings of ancient texts but by showing how a ‘universe of political meaning’ is configured through classical (re)appropriations, and likewise, how dilemmas of contemporary politics (sovereignty, empire) are made intelligible through ongoing dialogue with the past.

The Debate on Immortality: Posthumanist Science vs. Critical Philosophy

At different times Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse argued that immortality is a condition of overcoming misery and achieving complete human freedom. Their arguments were made before “practical immortality” had become a concrete scientific project. The difference between what was then and what is now scientifically possible alters the ethical and political value of the idea of immortality. Had the first generation of critical theorists occupied the present historical moment, they would have realized that science harnessed to the demand for limitless life would not solve the kind of ethical and existential problems they hoped it would. I argue that the scientific struggle against human finitude is driven by the same egocentric concern for money and self-maximization that early critical theory diagnosed as the main psychological pathology caused by capitalism. Finitude, I conclude, is the price human beings must pay if they are to live free and meaningful lives.

Towards the World: Eugen Fink on the Cosmological Value of Play

According to Eugen Fink, a thorough elucidation of the meaning of play has the capacity to lead us towards an understanding of the world as a totality. In order to go beyond Plato’s understanding of play as an inferior copy of serious action, Fink provides an analysis of the cultic game. This form of playing cannot be said to be the origin of all play, but it enables us to demonstrate how the act of playing transcends circumscribed beings inside the world and provides a relationship with a higher whole, in which the community participating in the play is encompassed. A masked shaman does not represent a particular god, but brings to presence the action of gods upon humans as such. Thus, the cultic game is a symbol of a more important reality, not an inferior representation of an individual reality. This, however, is still not a sufficiently radical interpretation of the ontological dimension of play: the whole is only understood as an action of gods, i.e. mediately. Fink strives to demonstrate on the contrary, how play is a fundamental understanding of the world as a whole without any mediation. Such a relationship is, according to him, essential for humans, and it is already anticipated in several fundamental human actions such as work, combat, governance and love. The reason for this is that these actions all fight against human finitude against the background of the infinitely powerful world. But again, these actions only relate to the world by transforming factual entities that surround us, i.e. again only mediately. For this reason, Fink demonstrates, through another series of structural descriptions, how humans, things, space and time are all profoundly transformed when they enter the playing field. Fink thus presents a complex of reasons on the ground of which we can consider play as the only human activity that teaches us in a direct way how to transcend individual beings and understand their relationship with the world as a totality.

Medicine Unboxed: frontiers and mortality

www.thelancet.com Vol 386 October 24, 2015 1611 Debate and cultural change in medicine are at the heart of Medicine Unboxed. Since 2009 we have invited health professionals and the public to engage in dialogue about how medicine encounters society. At our annual events, patients, physicians, writers, philosophers, politicians, performers, and artists discuss medicine’s goals and society’s values, often seen through the prism of the medical humanities. Last year’s Medicine Unboxed was on the theme of Frontiers. Speakers explored the moral interface between the individual and society; the line that separates life and death, self and other; technological advances that demand reappraisal of our understanding of humanity and life; and the resonances between a changing landscape, ageing, and human fi nitude. In the next few weeks, the Art of Medicine section in The Lancet will feature essays that came out of the Frontiers event from Philip Gross, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Christopher Potter, and I. On Nov 22, 2015, in Cheltenham, UK, the theme of Medicine Unboxed is Mortality. Our speakers and audience will explore life and death and the lines that separate them. We will hear the sounds of loss and grief and recovery and how death is felt in war, in hospital, and in our homes. We’ll see medicine’s hand raised against death and suff ering and explore its duties to the living and dying. We’ll ask what a life costs and what it is worth. We will look at social and cultural diff erences in the experience of death, how immortality is conceived in mythology and sought in technology, our pursuit of the afterlife, and how fact and imagination meet in our encounter with death. At this year’s event speakers will include Marion Coutts, Rhidian Brook, Henry Marsh, Ann Wroe, Michael Symmons Roberts, Dave Goulson, Iona Heath, Julian Baggini, Salley Vickers, Allan Kellehear, Peter Stanford, Jo Shapcott, Ray Tallis, Sue Black, Jane Draycott, Richard Horton, Jay Carver, Rob George, Nick Lane, Katie Siddle, Bob Heath, Tom de Freston, Peter Thomas, Rebecca Gross, and Paul McMaster. The conference will also see the award of the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize. I hope reading the essays in The Lancet will encourage you to come and join the debate.

Investigation of Freedom in Its Ontological Sense

The article considers the category of freedom in its ontological sense. Due to the plural character of contemporary situation, within which person finds him- or herself lost without any reliable ground, it is necessary to investigate the question of freedom of the human “I”, although many philosophers of the past had already investigated this problem in diverse ways. We conceive the question of freedom as deep and, at the same time, multiple one. Methodologically, the current article poses this question in different ways, taking into consideration the individual level of being. This phenomenological approach (in its wide sense) allows to understand ontological ground of freedom due to varying the way to pose a question while considering the ultimate experiencing of being through such “existentials”, as human finitude, responsibility for the “Other”, happiness and destiny. We also rethink the ontological situation of searching for the sense of freedom, trying to trace a kind of a “dialog” between contemporary philosophers and such thinkers of the past, as Plato, B. Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz, I. Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, M.M. Bakhtin, M. Heidegger. This discussion is organized not in “retrospective” fashion, but in a “problematical” one. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s3p11

Ui-won: The 18-19C Joseon Scholar’s Garden of Imagination

A ui-won is a garden created by and enjoyed through the mind by late-Joseon dynasty scholars. Its enjoyment was however not always constrained to the mind, as at times it was reproduced into forms such as the written word and painting. The garden is the stage where one strives to transcend human limits and finitude, the mise-en-scène created by imagination and inspiration. The ui-won is the product of the effort to create this realm through the imagination. The practice of ui-won began in earnest during the eighteenth century, when the economy and culture of the Joseon society prospered and matured. In the difficult and unsympathetic life that scholars in the city led, a ui-won appeased the pang of unfulfilled desires in reality while vicariously gratifying the dream of spiritual transcendence. Also, as it was shared among fellow scholars in the form of poetry, essays and paintings as a sophisticated form of leisure, it facilitated the communication and understanding between them. The ui-won, satisfying the aesthetic taste and cultural demand of the time with its foundation on a hypothetical world of free imagination, also sheds light on the contemporary quest for a new way of communicating gardens in this digital age.

The old-new meaning of the researcher's responsibility.

If the technological situation is unique, the ways to understand the contemporary moral condition are not. We link it to age-old questions: in fact, the power promised by technol- ogy only establishes a new form of human finitude. In the face of this continuity of the fundamental moral condition, we examine a number of alternative ways of thinking about the basis of responsible innovation, exploring the metaphors of quasi-parental and political responsibilities, as well as the place of virtue in innovation and the role of cul- tural narratives in helping us understand the limits of responsible innovation. The problem of responsible innovation stems from a contradiction that af- fects the social authority possessed by scientific knowledge. This is the con- tradiction between the promise of knowledge without intrinsic limits, and the limits that actually emerge when the products of this knowledge, in the form of technology, generate radical uncertainty about the future. Human desire is yet another part of the human condition that also possesses no in- trinsic limits. Unconstrained by the voice of reason, passions can reinforce themselves with unbounded strength for an indefinite period of time. They provoke emotions, whose contribution to moral judgement stands on a par with the input of a consequentialist calculation of costs and benefits associ- ated with one's action. Hence the necessity to take them into account in ad- dressing the problems of responsible innovation. The 20 th century was replete with reflections and reactions on what was perceived as the failed promises of rational science and the enlightened man. From the Holocaust and the Gulag on the social side, to Chernobyl, Fuku- shima, the debacle of GMOs, intrusions of privacy, and contaminated medi- cines (from haemophilia blood products in the 1980s to cardiac drugs in the 2010s) on the technological side, all of these catastrophic events involved the unforeseen consequences of technological innovation as either leading vec- tors or helpful mediators of evil. The psychological and moral experiences that these events induced in human societies had a traumatic character (Frankl 1946), in which the claims of a trusted authority were unexpectedly

Technology and human finitude

In this text I discuss the fundamental problem of human finitude. This is an issue that comes up in both sources of Western ethical tradition, both the Judaic and the Greek source. The ancient wisdom teaches human finitude and enjoins human beings to avoid hubris, the belief that they are gods. Despite, or rather because of the many advances in technology that have occurred in the past century, we can still draw on this tradition for wisdom. The text is divided into three parts: ontological finitude, epistemological finitude and democracy as recognition of finitude. A systems-theoretic concept of human action and the concept of “entangled hierarchy” are introduced to explain the relevance of finitude to technology.

“A Sort of Metaphor”: Dynamic Figurative Language in Nietzsche, Pound, and H. D.

“A Sort of Metaphor”:Dynamic Figurative Language in Nietzsche, Pound, and H. D. Chet Lisiecki (bio) There are epochs in which the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition, the other filled with scorn for abstraction, the latter as unreasonable as the former is unartistic. Friedrich Nietzsche1 Go in fear of abstractions. Ezra Pound2 In “A Tory Philosophy,” published in The Commentator in five installments between April and May of 1912, T. E. Hulme criticized Friedrich Nietzsche for his tendency towards romantic abstraction. “In him you have the spectacle of a romantic seizing on the classic point of view because it attracted him purely as a theory, and who, being a romantic, in taking up this theory, passed his slimy fingers over every detail of it.”3 A few months prior to writing “A Tory Philosophy,” Hulme had elaborated on these concepts in his notorious essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” in which he heralds an age of “dry, hard, classical verse” whereby “even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets his finiteness, this limit of man. … He never flies away into the circumambient gas.”4 Contrary to Hulme’s accusation, however, Nietzschean vitalism does recognize and affirm human finitude, the dying body, as a challenge to Christian spiritualism. In the famous aphorism “The Heaviest Burden” from book four of The Gay Science, for example, the seemingly romantic notion of the [End Page 255] eternal repetition of the same functions as a thought experiment through which to realize and affirm the imposing limitations of suffering and powerlessness. The “thought,” or possibility, of an eternal return could “crush” the subject unable to “transform.”5 The great Übermensch Zarathustra, who descends from his cave in the clouds, reminds us of such powerlessness when he writes, “The will cannot will backwards.” In his self-genealogy, Nietzsche invokes his notion of “amor fati” by writing, “Granting that I am a decadent, I am the opposite as well.”6 Each of these instances exemplifies both Nietzsche’s theorizing of subjectivity as a dynamic and mutable fiction and his resistance to the abstraction of subjectivity into a fixed, stable, and limitless concept as promoted by Christianity. While Nietzsche most fully develops this existentialist phenomenology that privileges intuition and sensation over conceptualization and metaphysics in his middle and late periods, the structural dynamism that shapes his philosophy is already evident in his much earlier essays on language and aesthetics, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-moral Sense” (written in 1873, published in German in 1896) and The Birth of Tragedy (published in German in 1872 and in English in 1909).7 While “On Truth and Lying” would have been considerably less well known at the birth of imagism, The Birth of Tragedy, anticipatory of “On Truth and Lying,” had been translated into English and would have been read even by those with limited or no access to the original German. And while it is widely acknowledged that Hulme, Pound, and the circle of writers associated with The New Age were familiar with Nietzsche, no thoroughgoing study of this relationship as it regards imagist poetic form has yet been undertaken.8 This article maps Nietzsche onto a genealogy of such form in a way that contrary to Hulme’s reading above foregrounds the immanence of “classical” linguistic dynamism, what Pound calls a “sort of metaphor,” in Nietzsche’s aesthetic writing.9 The vitalist, sensationist overtones of Nietzsche’s understanding of metaphor as “an image which takes the place of … something he can really see before him as a substitute for a concept,” I argue, provides a vital context for historicizing not only Hulmean polemics but also Pound’s turn from imagism to vorticism.10 In “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche questions the referential stability of language by positing that a lost “primitive world of metaphor,” the world of myth and art, has been displaced by modern, ossified metaphors that proclaim truth. In their distorted sense of literary history, Hulme and Pound complained similarly about the modern state of metaphor. While metaphor was integral to what Hulme...

Understanding Loss, Mourning, and Caring - From a Perspective of Pastoral Theology

The purpose of this article is to understand loss, mourning, and caring from a perspective of pastoral theology. While overcoming the linear description of loss and mourning, this study is also to explore the comprehensive process of loss and mourning, and to present an effective method of pastoral care in order to promote the healing of loss and mourning. As if going up the spiral steps, the process of mourning involves the dynamic and complicated dimensions which includes the interactive changes of emotion, and thought, and behavior. As such, pastoral caregiver helps the mourner to (re)form the relational self, while both listening empathically the voice of mourner and paying attention to the painful situation. Pastoral caregiver needs to share the sense of loss and grief, and needs to guide the mourner to establish the new and alternate relationship. Pastoral caregiver is able to use the following method of pastoral care in order to enhance the healing of mourning: 1) to express freely the sense of deep grief in a safe place, 2) to confront with the reality of loss, 3) to accept positively the mourner himself/herself, 4) to relate with other people in the community, 5) to reflect on the life and death in the religious/spiritual dimension, 6) to reorganize the sense of loss and to proceed with new life. In the healing process of mourning, ‘the ability to mourn deeply’ denotes ‘the ability to relate wholly.’ As such, pastoral caregiver leads the mourner to recover the relationships of mourner-mourner himself/herself, mourner-others(e.g., church community members or local community members), and mourner-the divine/God. From a perspective of pastoral theology, Christians enable to accept positively human finitude (which includes loss and death) in the providence of God’s creation. ‘We are able to mourn together’ means ‘we are able to love one another’ through the compassionate love of God. Especially, we enable to see God who suffers with us in the context of loss and grief, to share our own pain and suffering, and to make together a new hope in the presence of God.

Book Discussion: Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Book Discussion: Bonnie Honig's Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)The Greeks invented both democracy and theater. And having done this much, they then invented a third thing-political theory-that allowed them to conceptualize relations between the other two.1 In Richard Halpern's provocatively terse schema, political theory connects, elaborates, and mediates between agora and theatron. While we may contest this characterization for the epiphenomenal place it assigns to theory and also for the way it seems to obscure the idea of democracy and theater as conceptual in themselves, it certainly provides an apt starting point for a discussion of Bonnie Honig's Antigone, Interrupted, a work that substantially re-conceptualizes a key intersection of democracy and theater: Sophocles's Antigone. In a wide-ranging and bravura re-reading of the Greek play and its legacies, Antigone, Interrupted seeks to disrupt the canonicity of a text that occupies a privileged place in both democratic and feminist theory.Since Hegel, it is the Antigone we turn to when we want to think about the relationship between and theater. It is also the play to which we turn for conversations about feminism and the state. Honig's broadest purpose is to interrupt this circuit and to contest these perpetual returns. Before we can move on from the play, she argues, we must move through it, generating new readings to displace entrenched ones both in the philosophical tradition more broadly and in contemporary feminist thought. Doing so, she argues, makes possible better political readings of Antigone, and also frees us to seek new horizons for feminist theorizing.At the core of Honig's critique of the feminist reception of Antigone is her turn away from what she calls the politics of which, she argues, too easily becomes a lamentation of politics. Honig challenges anti-state feminist readings of Antigone, a tradition that includes, among others, Virginia Woolf, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler. She also challenges a certain strain in French thought associated Nicole Loraux, one that emphasizes tragedy as an anti-political genre concerned mourning and human finitude rather than the training of citizens for the city-state. Honig questions the efficacy of the politics of surrounding the figure of Antigone in a range of cultural incarnations from the Argentinean Madres de Plaza de Mayo to the anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan, all of whom ground their protests in maternal lamentation. It is this understanding of Antigone as outside the political, lamenting her brother but also the sphere of itself, which Honig seeks to interrupt.In the second half of the book, conspiracy joins interruption as an organizing principle as Honig shows us an Antigone conspiring both with language and her sister Ismene to make a claim for sovereignty by seeking, soliciting, constituting publics (90). …

Revising the Human in Samuel Beckett’s Aesthetic Education

While Beckett, with his aesthetics of ignorance and impotence, has often been claimed as an antihumanist, his abiding artistic concern remained the elusive question of the human and its ends or purposes. Admittedly, this humanism is “cruelly humane,” as it compulsively excavates the depths of human abjection, suffering and infirmity; but even as the human remains unknowable in Beckett, the impetus to “go on” with the endeavor is appallingly resilient and affecting — and, artistically, it is remarkably fruitful. What emerges from this inexhaustible drive for ends and purposes, in a world of “finality without end” or “purpose without purposiveness,” is a kind of play, which ranges from the laughable and pitiful to the excruciating and poignant. And it is precisely in this play, I argue, that Beckettian humanism and Beckettian aesthetics converge. Revising the aesthetic tradition of Kant and Schiller, his work rejects the beautiful, and its putative harmonization of the mental faculties, as the privileged and proper domain of art; instead, it activates a confrontational aesthetic, the experience of which is predominantly one of discord and discomfort. Through its play, this aesthetic takes us back to our human finitude, revealing, in place of freedom and transcendence, the indefinite and grimly humorous. For Beckett, then, play seems to be constitutive of both the art and the human, and we are never more human than when we play. The ends and meaning will remain indefinite, but such play may have the capacity to revitalize the imagination and encourage us to go on, wherever that may be.

Religious Heretic, Political Prophet

Abstract The religious and political thought of Malcolm X underscores a radical politico-ethical tradition that speaks to a fundamental but neglected aspect of American democracy: the idea that democracy cannot flourish without a radical (individual and collective) ethics. Malcolm X's speeches, particularly in his late career, illustrate the degree to which American democracy is unrealizable unless it can give an account of human finitude in a social context of anti-Black racism. I contend that Malcolm X's move toward human rights activism during his mature political development is contingent on a radical ethics at the individual and group level. It is an ethical practice based on reflective intentionality and creative exchange. I call this vision of radical praxis abolition ethics.

Object-Oriented Ontology’s Endless Ethics. A review of Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

Object-Oriented Ontology’s Endless Ethics. A review of Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing Cristin Ellis (bio) Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. It is reported that, while out on a stroll with friends one day, the Transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody walked into a tree limb. Picking herself up, she explained to her concerned companions, “I saw it, but I did not realize it.”1 This story’s appeal lies in its succinct, slapstick debunking of Transcendentalist claims to omniscience: whilst enjoying the view as a “transparent eye-ball,” Peabody got poked in her real one. For scholars in the small but energized field of Object-Oriented Ontology, however, Peabody’s myopia could more broadly be said to exemplify, albeit in cartoon form, a kind of object-blindness that in fact plagues the entire tradition of post-Kantian philosophy. Spearheaded by the work of philosopher Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (“OOO”) takes issue with Kant’s conclusion that, since the object-in-itself is beyond human perception, the question of object ontology lies outside of philosophy’s purview.2 It argues that, by exiling object-being from the field of inquiry, Kant’s Copernican Revolution sentenced philosophy to a narrow anthropocentrism, sponsoring a tradition that unjustly privileges human perception as the only available gauge of reality. OOO proposes to remedy this error by framing a new metaphysics that would restore unmediated object-being to the sphere of philosophical speculation. This is not to say that OOO proposes to solve the problem of human finitude—and here is one of many ways OOO diverges from other metaphysics associated with Speculative Realism, the philosophical movement of which OOO is a branch.3 On the contrary, OOO freely concedes Kant’s point that the ontology of objects is inaccessible—being, in Harman’s words, infinitely “withdraws from human view into a dark subterranean reality” (Harman, Prince of Networks 1). Instead of overturning Kant, OOO universalizes the problem of finitude, arguing that all instances of relation—human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate—are subject to the conditions of mediation. On this view, a billiard ball’s encounter with a felt bumper is no less mediated than Peabody’s encounter with a tree limb. OOO would argue that both Peabody and the billiard ball “prehend” (in Whitehead’s term) their worlds according to rules particular to their constitution. Thus OOO strives to combat philosophical anthropocentrism by insisting that human experience is only one of billions of modes of perceiving the world. That it happens to be our mode does not justify the decision to preclude philosophical speculation about others.4 In Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost’s enticingly slim and conversational new contribution to OOO, Bogost contends that media studies are uniquely suited to take up this challenge of imagining object “perception.” Since Alien Phenomenology is therefore not a book of object-oriented philosophy per se, but rather a book about object-oriented methodology, it will likely be of more use to those already familiar with OOO than to those seeking an introduction to object-oriented philosophy. Wondering if “scholarly productivity [must] take written form,” Alien Phenomenology envisions an alternative philosophy that would involve fewer precarious sentences and more instructive objects. In this applied practice, objects would serve as “philosophical lab equipment” for exploring and exemplifying theory (89, 100). For Bogost, this shift from argumentation to objectification is particularly critical to the future of object-oriented studies. That is, while Bogost suggests that all philosophy might benefit from a move away from academic writing (which he finds hopelessly prone to “obfuscation, disconnection, jargon and overall incomprehensibility”), he argues that OOO is particularly disadvantaged by academia’s “semiotic obsession” insofar as this has had the tendency to aggrandize linguistic over other modes of representing the world (89, 91). By contrast, Bogost observes, if we wish “to approach the nonsemiotic world,” we must do so, in Levi Bryant’s words, “‘on its own terms as best we can’” (qtd. in Bogost 90). That means blending conventional philosophizing with extralinguistic...

Chronic use of benzodiazepines among older adults.

OBJECTIVETo analyze the perception of and motivation for the chronic use of benzodiazepine among older adults.METHODSA qualitative study was conducted on 22 older adults living in Bambuí, MG, Southeastern Brazil, who were taking benzodiazepines and had the clinical and cognitive ability to respond to interview questions. The collected data were analyzed on the basis of the “signs, meanings, and actions” model.RESULTSThe main reasons pointed out for the use of benzodiazepines were “nervousness”, “sleep problems”, and “worry” due to family and financial problems, everyday problems, and existential difficulties. None of the interviewees said that they used benzodiazepines in a dose higher than that recommended or had been warned by health professionals about any risks of their continuous use. Different strategies were used to obtain the prescription for the medication, and any physician would prescribe it, indicating that a bond was established with the drug and not with the health professional or healthcare service. Obtaining and consuming the medication turned into a crucial issue because benzodiazepine assumes the status of an essential food, which leads users to not think but sleep. It causes a feeling of relief from their problems such as awareness of human finitude and fragility, existential difficulties, and family problems.CONCLUSIONSBenzodiazepine assumes the characteristics of polyvalence among older adults, which extrapolate specific clinical indications, and of essentiality to deal with life’s problems in old age. Although it relieves the “nerves”, the chronic use of benzodiazepines buffers suffering and prevents older adults from going through the suffering. This shows important difficulties in the organization and planning of strategies that are necessary for minimizing the chronic use in this population.

Medicine: 30 years after the death of the great humanist.

Having been the son, grandson and great-grandson of physicians, was not easy to tell his father that he would not continue the family tradition. But, despite this decision, throughout his life he maintained a strong relationship with medicine, dedicating some of his most significant works. In this regard, his vision could be summarized as: science and technology have brought many advances in medicine, but also engendered increasingly serious ethical challenges. Amongst them worsening health conditions and existence of a majority of those excluded progress and actual aggression to the supreme ethical values. Therefore, Foucault positions critically derivatives based on ethical values of human dignity. In addition to scientific training is required for the formation of a moral conscience and criticism. This knowledge is not knowledge driven or the advancement of medical science, but of course that can be given to teaching whose priority is not neglect-humanistic ethics of scientific medicine, always humanizing dimension. After the violent criticizes psychiatry deployed in History of Madness, in The Birth of the Clinic accepts scientificity of medicine, noting that the clinic is the articulation of things “in a language in which we have recognizing positive science ". Along with this positivist praise of medicine, Foucault reveals his fascination with the subject of death. The link established between the death and medicine, beyond what anatomo - clinical relates to the issue of human finitude. Proof of this is the approach that operates between medical expertise and experience of finitude lyric in Holderlin and Rilke. Death can be averted: Medicine announces relentless man wearing limit in itself, yet it also speaks of "the technical world that is armed, positive and full form of his finitude”. Foucault was concerned man holistically: just psychosomatic unity taken as a man can be considered subject. Hence his criticism of psychiatry and psychoanalysis can be attributed to this conception of man as the subject of its own shares, considering that for the philosopher, in these medical or paramedical practices, the patient is not subject but object of medical knowledge. Medicine constitutes an ethical space of existence, considering that ethics is an absolute priority in the relationship established between doctor and patient. On the other hand, does not exhaust the ethical humanistic or it is reduced to ethics; humanistic has

Death over time: brief notes about death and dying in the West

This literature review deals with death and the changes in its concept and meanings over time, aiming to relate this to the different social organizations and issues that involve individuality and human finitude. It intends to arouse the reflection about this theme respected by all of us, and related to our own contingency. In this sense, the article provides several perspectives through different authors' voices, seeking to understand how we arrived at this contemporary stage where death must be forgotten at any cost. It is a forbidden subject even inevitably being part of our daily lives, and its guardians must increasingly insure the non-participation and non-involvement of the people. Therefore, understanding the past stages of death, from its proximity to its banishment from the social life, is a necessary condition to analyzing our own end, and the end of our own individuality.